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Jofwu

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I'd like to take a moment and lay out what I've done with the Help articles.

I've moved my new "guide" pages to the top of Help:Contents. I suspect most people looking for Help are newer editors trying to figure out what they're doing, so these should be the first thing they see there.

These articles are numbered, to suggest that they should be read in sequence. They build on one another in a logical progression. I've tried to write them such that a person totally unfamiliar with wiki editing can start with "1. Getting Started" and naturally make their way through them in this order. I've toyed with the idea of linking each article to the next in the sequence. A link at the top or bottom of each page pointing to the next? Does this make sense or is it a bad idea? I'm not sure how to do it (stylistically), and it admittedly feels wrong in a wiki.

I created a second section for additional help pages that aren't part of the main sequence of the "guide". These are advanced topics, pages that go into more detail about something or other, etc. I do want to take a look at some of these, maybe add some more, but they're not my top priority.

I believe the following pages can be deleted, but I didn't want to stick a bunch of {{delete}} tags without running this by others first:
Help:Cite - Covered by Help:References.
Help:Categorization - Mostly covered by Help:Categories. There's some advanced discussion I left out, but I suspect nobody will miss it? And there are lists of category examples, which I personally don't find helpful; better to just direct people to Category pages, no?
Help:Editing - Covered in various Help articles.

At this point I think my new pages are mostly complete. I need more people to look them over and offer feedback! So if you have a chance to peruse, let me know what you think. Keep in mind that they're particularly targeting newer editors. My hope is that a good, clear guide will help more people get involved with editing!

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I would say that Help:Categorization is important because it is the place where the entire list of categories is explained. I do not want that removed. It was a thing I wrote to be exhaustive and is important to keep. I spent a long time writing it. I will investigate the other ones later.

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27 minutes ago, Chaos said:

I would say that Help:Categorization is important because it is the place where the entire list of categories is explained. I do not want that removed. It was a thing I wrote to be exhaustive and is important to keep. I spent a long time writing it. I will investigate the other ones later.

For some reason I was thinking that it is not exhaustive, which is why it seemed superfluous. Maybe I'm crazy, or maybe it just needs updating. :-)  I'll look into that.

Edited by jofwu
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It probably does need some updating but it does have a lot of information on why categories are there and which type they are. 

Honestly writing that article down helped ME figure out what the crap was going on with that stuff, haha.

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On 1/4/2017 at 5:07 PM, jofwu said:

These articles are numbered, to suggest that they should be read in sequence. They build on one another in a logical progression. I've tried to write them such that a person totally unfamiliar with wiki editing can start with "1. Getting Started" and naturally make their way through them in this order. I've toyed with the idea of linking each article to the next in the sequence. A link at the top or bottom of each page pointing to the next? Does this make sense or is it a bad idea? I'm not sure how to do it (stylistically), and it admittedly feels wrong in a wiki.

I personally like the idea of linking them as a sequence. I created a Help Template that is based off the Event Template that could be added to the bottom of the page for easier navigation. I want other opinions on if this is a good idea or not.

I've only read the first few articles so far, but the ones I read were very good. The one thing I noticed missing is the information on article and section titles in the Style Guide page and not in the Guidelines page. I would also suggest moving the capitalization section of Coppermind:Style to Help:Capitalization and deleting the page since all the other information seems to be covered more clearly and thoroughly by Help:Guidelines.

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This is a great idea! I wonder if it would be better in the top right corner rather than at the bottom?

I'll see about adding some info about aericke/section titles to the guidelines page. That should definitely be mentioned there.

I wouldn't want to include capitalization though. It would take a lot of space and I think is more specific than that page warrants. I'm also guessing the Style guide should remain. I think it's more an official document than a help guide.

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I can see the appeal of your template, but I also think it's worth having either a standard navbox or something like wikipedias 'lists of articles on topic' that they sometimes have as or below the infobox. that lists all the important help articles. or maybe a top-of-the-page 'toc' like banner kinda thing.... *strokes chin in thought*

Edit: I went ahead and just tried it out... then have added it to the tops of pages

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